Here’s to your health

For the past several years, I have been reading my way through the Bible from cover to cover. In December, I finally reached Revelation. Do you know which word is generally associated with Revelation?

Apocalypse. 

And that brings me to our most recent voyage. If you’ve read any of my posts over the past decade, you will know that travel and I have a very intense love/hate relationship, i.e. I love visiting new places, but I hate getting there. Disaster seems to strike every time I venture beyond my front door, yet I keep on travelling. Why? Because as soon as it’s over, I forget the bad part and retain the good ... until the next voyage-related calamity, when it’s too late to back out.

Anyway, 2021 being what it was, I probably could have guessed it would come to an unpleasant climax. Mad optimism, however, drove us to buy tickets to visit my parents in the US for Christmas, seeing as how the last time we were able to do that was in blithely ignorant 2019. 

So we bought tickets. Or, more accurately, my husband bought tickets; my travel anxiety is such that the mere thought of visiting kayak.com triples my heart rate. Anyway. We acquired tickets. And a rental car. And a taxi. And I printed out my famous, excruciatingly-detailed packing list in 9-point font. And that was that.

The day before our departure, everyone took the requisite Covid test at our least-favorite neighborhood pharmacy, where every visit means standing in line to register indoors, then standing in line again to take the test outdoors, while certain children—who shall remain nameless—run, screaming, up and down the sidewalk and/or blow raspberries against the storefront windows and/or activate (and re-activate. And re-activate. And re-activate) the pharmacy’s automatic doors. 

At least we all tested negative.

The next day, we arrived at the airport FOUR HOURS EARLY, which is what one must do now in the Pangolin Era. It went as well as could be hoped for us; we managed to actually board our plane, which was a definite improvement over our last voyage, and 12 hours or so later we landed in Los Angeles, where we promptly headed to our usual mediocre-yet-reliable airport hotel. For dinner, we had the option of either Taco Bell, where I had not set foot since age 17, or Subway, which we have in France. So we chose Taco Bell for its “exoticism.” But this was no ordinary Taco Bell; this was Pandemic Taco Bell, where the order counter is behind a wall of cellophane and the seating area is roped off with crime scene tape. Come to think of it, that might actually have been a crime scene; LA is dangerous.

The next day, we picked up our rental car in a singularly bizarre location (inside the lobby of a nearby Marriott? Why?). And off we went, despite the fact that my husband felt a bit weird. “Jet lag,” I assured him (*queue ominous music*). We didn’t want to go directly to San Diego, as that would have been too easy, so we stopped at Venice Beach. It was sunny. We took photos. We strolled up and down the sidewalk, trying to sufficiently appreciate the tackiness of the excessively-colorful commerces selling everything from healing crystals to 12-flavor corndogs to underwear with saucy quips splashed across the derrière. We saw, among other novelties, a bare-breasted woman on roller skates; we bought lunch from a dude with what looked like a golf ball in his left eye socket; our son attacked some seagulls with a giant Snoopy glow stick that he found outside the public toilets; and everyone (but me) got covered in sand and seawater. Then we climbed into the car and drove straight into LA Friday afternoon traffic, thus taking five hours to reach my parents’ house instead of three. 

Maybe next time we’ll skip Venice Beach.

Oh, but then we’d miss out on this.

The actual visit was great. We celebrated Christmas as only the Holts can; we hiked all over the place, went shopping, visited friends, went to church, sang carols, lit a whole lot of candles, drank many gin & tonics, ate a ton of Mexican food (which is always my #2 reason to visit home anyway) and agreed once again that there’s no one quite like Paul Simon. Check it out:

Oh yeah, and we all caught Covid-19. 

Turns out my husband felt under the weather because he quite simply had been infected with Omicron. Oops. “But wait!” I can hear you saying. “You said everyone tested negative!” Indeed, we did test negative. But that was only because my husband had caught the virus mere hours before getting tested. He caught it at his company’s Christmas luncheon, and we know this because we later found out that EVERYONE who attended it also caught the virus. They actually had to close and disinfect the entire office. 

But hey, on the upside, our symptoms were mild. In fact, I didn’t even know I had it until I took a home test the day before our scheduled return date “just to be sure” and it came up positive: Two bright blue lines appeared with the same speed and certitude as a pregnancy test taken when you’re already three months along. 

The folks at Air France, to their credit, were very understanding. We changed our dates, extended our car rental, emailed a few folks and added four days to our vacation. After that, I took another test. STILL POSITIVE. My husband couldn’t take any more time off from work, and since HE was negative, he and our son headed back to France while I remained with our daughter at my parents’ home for another three days (which was fun, don’t get me wrong). Ultimately, my immune system dispensed of the accursed virus and we too were able to board a flight back to Paris. Whew!

So that was the 2021 season finale. Shall we call it “challenging” for lack of a non-four-letter synonym? It was challenging. But what is it we’re supposed to always say about challenges? That they conceal opportunities! And sometimes, they conceal said opportunities so well that they are completely undetectable! Actually, one opportunity made itself abundantly clear throughout this particular challenge: wine. More, more wine.

It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

And that, as they say, is all she wrote. Until next time!

And a little child shall lead them

One of the things that I love the most about living in France is its proximity to other countries, which makes international travel a breeze. Thus, we do a lot of it. Our latest trip took us to Bavaria, a very reasonable 6-hour drive from Paris. Le Mot Juste is not an adventure blog, so I won’t delve into the delights of the region (which are many). Instead, I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of travel that has been part of our experience since 2013 and will continue to be part of our experience until we lose our minds and give up altogether: travelling with small children.

Now, I will admit that I once used to be somewhat child-intolerant, but a) that was pretty much limited to screaming babies on public transportation, and even then they had to REALLY be screamy, and b) as the French say, il n’y a que les cons qui ne changent pas d’avis (only idiots never change their minds). I am not an idiot, generally speaking; therefore, I am not averse to changing my mind. With regard to children, I have definitely changed—for now I am on the other side of the aisle, as it were, and find myself frequently confronted with varying degrees of child intolerance.

But this most recent trip took it to a whole other level.

I was not prepared for the amount of blatant anti-child nastiness we encountered on our journey. Blank stares, outright glaring, impromptu lecturing, knocking on our hotel room door to tell us to pipe down…. At one point, we had just arrived in a crowded restaurant whose decibel level was off the charts, and yet we STILL managed to piss off a couple seated at a table next to ours, simply by our encroachment on “their” sphere of existence.

Are we unnaturally obnoxious? We make more noise than a couple, that’s for sure. But we are not insane, shrieking, out-of-control freaks, either. We’re what one might call a “family,” with these things called “children,” which, contrary to what many folks apparently believe, are not in fact miniature adults whose primary goal in life is to conform to other people’s unrealistic expectations. They make noise, and cannot understand why everyone keeps telling them to shut up—or better yet, go away—in a more or less aggressive fashion. 

My little girl, who is three, was “shhh’d” at with irritation in a church in Munich, simply because she was running. Not racing around screeching and knocking statues over, mind you. Just pitter-pattering her little feet as three-year-olds are wont to do. You know, because she was feeling joyful. Did Jesus not say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”? I should have said as much to the shhh-er, except my German is limited to dankeschön—and this was not a dankeschön kind of moment.

But lest anyone think that I am singling out Germans, don’t worry; our ability to aggravate is truly without borders.

We have been scolded and scoffed at on the TGV in France on many occasions, simply because our kids were existing too loudly in the library-like silence of the “family” coach.

We travelled to Scotland two summers ago and were dismayed at the number of cozy, welcoming-looking bed and breakfasts that formally refused families. 

Italy is the exception that proves the rule: our kids are treated to a chorus of Che bello! Che bella! at every corner and so UNUSED are we to warm smiles and spontaneous displays of affection from perfect strangers that it often takes us a few days to acclimate. Do Italians have bigger hearts than everyone else? I think they just might!

Contrast that attitude with all the “anti-stroller” restaurants (I’m looking at you, NYC), kid-free zones on trains, and the very real demand for childless flights. Never mind how demonstrably loud modern living is; apparently the sound of a disgruntled baby is so disturbing to some that they would happily pay a premium, just to shield their delicate senses from the nuisance. 

What does it say about our civilization as a whole that we are ready to go to such lengths to exclude entire swaths of it, simply because we find something about “them” insufferable? If we had any sense left in us, we would recognize and cherish the very old and the very young for what they are—our greatest treasure and our greatest hope. Instead, we have turned them into pariahs. The elderly, the sick, the weak: we don’t want to see them. The young, the high-spirited, the willful: we might be okay with seeing them, but we sure as hell don’t want to hear them. We’d rather embrace the insanity of imagining that it was never and will never be our turn—that “they” are nothing like “us.”

How many so-called woke people who pride themselves on their open-mindedness and inclusive attitude toward other cultures, ethnicities, and religions see no hypocrisy what-so-ever in turning up their noses at children? Today, being blatantly intolerant is uncool—unless your intolerance is directed at a child, that is. Then it’s justifiable, for how dare that child not comply with your idea of what she should be? 

You do realize that hating someone because he has ancestry that you don’t like is EVERY BIT AS LUDICROUS as hating someone because she’s a child acting how normal children act, right? Saying “I don’t like children” is NO BETTER than saying “I don’t like short people” or “I don’t like foreigners” or “I don’t like redheads.” All of it is intolerance, and all of it is unacceptable.

How does this even need to be said? And yet clearly it does.

Meanwhile, look around you the next time you’re out. How many couples and even entire families sit together in absolute silence, eyes glued to their telephone screens? The art of human interaction is rapidly fading away; we appear to be more at ease with Siri than we are with one another. And yet we find that normal.

We invite dogs into our restaurants and no one bats an eye. Quite the contrary! Oh, how sweet. Can I pet him? But a child—or worse, a baby? Immediate wariness. Nine times out of ten, when my husband and I enter any restaurant other than a fast food joint with our kids and are shuffling around getting ourselves situated, there are multiple pairs of eyes staring disapprovingly at us. I swear I can feel the judgement like hot coals on my skin. C’est in-sup-por-ta-ble.

How bad is it for you really, childless person? Is someone else’s kid (mine, for example) doing a tap dance in the middle of your dinner plate? Knocking over your cocktail? Setting your hair on fire? Probably not. His PARENTS, on the other hand, are undoubtedly exhausted in every sense of the term. Why? Because nothing—NOTHING—is harder than parenting. It is, to quote Jerry Maguire, “an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will NEVER fully tell you about.” 

On behalf of all parents, try to have some empathy. We are fully aware of the disturbance that our kid(s) can cause, and are trying our best to keep things as calm as possible. We do not need your dark looks, your audible sighs, your eye-rolling, or any of your other insensitive, self-superior, and frankly childish theatrics. You don’t like kids? By all means feel free not to have any. But leave your reverse ageism at home. Better yet, stay at home yourself: it is guaranteed to be quiet and totally free of those small creatures you seem to loathe so much—who, incidentally, also represent the survival of your own foolhardy species.

I was on a plane not that long ago from New York to Paris. A baby cried intermittently throughout the 7-hour flight. It wasn’t fun for anybody—but do you know who it really wasn’t fun for? The mother. She spent the entire time rocking her clearly suffering child, singing to him, and trying to soothe him as best she could while also caring for his sibling seated next to her. When the plane finally began to descend toward the runway, and the ill child’s whimpering intensified, one woman seated two rows up distinctly said, without a shred of irony, “Decapitate him.” 

Decapitate him.

That’s where we are today. And we should be absolutely ASHAMED to have let our “enlightened” values sink so low as to justify pointing our finger at a beleaguered single mother and her sick baby instead of pulling our heads out of our own cold, disdainful asses and going over to ask her what we can do to be helpful.

Naturally, no one took the mother’s defense. So I did. And my husband did. And together we told that passenger and her bloated ego to STFU or go buy herself a spot in first class instead of on a low-cost red-eye that only the heavily drugged would ever have managed to sleep through in the first place.

Tell me this: is it the child whose behavior is truly destructive? Or is it yours, the so-called adult who refuses to accept the nature of children and would rather condemn them for somehow offending your over-privileged sense of decorum?

As we head into the Christmas season, a season that still smiles fondly on children, let us remember why we celebrate it in the first place: because God so loved the world that He took the form of a tiny child in order to save us from ourselves.

But we’d rather smirk at such a notion and write it off as myth, all the better to justify our refusal to love one another in return, whether adult or child—even when deep down, we know better.

Visions of sugarplums

I’m not really a dessert person. Oh, I love tarte Tatin (it’s like an upside-down apple pie and I’m from the apple pie capital of America, so no surprise there). And macarons. And I can be coaxed into the occasional moelleux au chocolat. But I cannot *make* any of these things. I can make pumpkin pie. And banana bread. That’s about it. Everything else turns out either too thin, too flat, too dry, too crumbly, too dark, or some unfortunate combination thereof.

Lacking any kind of talent in this area never particularly bothered me until I became a mom. Living in France and all, where children’s 4 p.m. snack-time is straight up sacrosanct, I kind of feel obligated to provide mine with a warm home that smells of sugar and spice—which is why I buy scented candles.

But this is Christmas. Christmas is different. Christmas means turning on the oven and baking sweet things. More specifically, my American psyche says that Christmas means baking COOKIES. I suck at baking cookies. However, this year I felt like family cookie time would be a nice festive bonding opportunity that we could all share, while listening to carols and smiling. I have these moments of suspended sanity sometimes, where I forget all past experience or indeed common sense and just dive, head-long, into guaranteed failure. This would be one such moment.

It doesn’t help matters that my Christmas cookie culture is more inferential than empirical; my mom being an enthusiastic devotee of the full organic SoCal lifestyle, my brother and I did not grow up eating chocolate chip cookies; we grew up gnawing on whole wheat-sesame-raisin-honey-nut thingies with an involuntarily blackened underside (I’ve inherited this trait, so no criticism here). Actual Christmas cookies—the kind made out of white flour and white sugar—were something the neighbors gave us once a year, probably out of pity.

I obviously don’t own any cookie recipes—because why would I?—but that is why we have the internet. So I hunted down some Better Homes-worthy candidates, printed them out, made a shopping list, and figured I was off to a good start. What I neglected to factor into the equation was that THIS IS FRANCE. One would think that after 20+ years of living here, I’d stop assuming anything, especially when it comes to Christmas (there are no candy canes! NO. CANDY. CANES.), but alas.

Now, in my defense, we do our shopping at what the French call an hypermarché, which supposedly translates as a “big box store,” although I’ve never used this particular term in my entire life, and I get the feeling that if I went and tried to sneak it into an English conversation, people would imagine I was talking about a cardboard specialty shop. In any case, “big box store” is a moronic translation for the hypermarché, which is where you go when you want to buy large quantities of multiple types of stuff, all in one place. Oodles of groceries, tons of toys, mountains of clothing, piles of housewares, etc. etc. etc. It’s like Walmart but way better (duh, it’s French). Ours is a Carrefour Planet, which I call “the Vortex,” because time seems to mysteriously speed up as soon as we’re inside; instead of taking 1-2 hours, the average visit takes us 5. So I figured, foolishly, that the Vortex would cover all of my cookie-baking needs.

Ah, but this is France, mes chéris. And France does things its own way.

Let’s start with molasses. Seems simple enough. The word exists in French—mélasse—and is a known ingredient (at least in the French West Indies); therefore, it should be a supermarket item like any other, according to me. Except that no, it isn’t. I scoured the (very large) baking aisle, the jams and jellies aisle, the organic aisle, and even the imports aisle (lost time: 30 minutes). Nothing. As my dad pointed out, France’s colonial past would indeed lead one to believe molasses to be a readily available commodity. Plus, France has quite a few overseas territories that grow what? SUGAR CANE. Rum, for instance, is not lacking here; the Vortex has all the rum anyone could need. No molasses, though. The same can be said of whole turkeys, but don’t get me started on that.

Fine. I scratched molasses off my list and figured I’d find a workaround. All the basics were there aplenty: butter, sugar, eggs, flour. No ready-made frosting, but who cares? I’d rather make my own (you heard me). However, things got tricky again when I reached the “decorations” part of my list: red and green sugar, holiday M&Ms, and Hershey’s Kisses. Oh yeah, and cookie cutters.

Red and green sugar: did the Vortex have it? No. In fact, the entire baking aisle looked much like it does the rest of the year, i.e., nothing particularly Christmassy about it. Thus, the only decorations available were the usual confetti sprinkles, chopped nuts, chocolate chips, vanilla extract, almond powder, etc. I looked, believe me. Up the aisle and down again. Crouched. Stood on my toes. NOTHING. Oh, there was colored sugar all right: gold sugar, pink sugar, pearled sugar. I even found candied fruit, but only YELLOW candied fruit. They must be doing this on purpose.

On to M&Ms. Do you think that the French stock holiday M&M’s (considering they do stock brownie M&Ms, mini M&Ms, and caramel M&Ms)? No, I’m sure you would never think anything so patently absurd. Anyway, they don’t. So I bought a normal bag and figured I’d PICK OUT the red and green ones. Hershey’s Kisses I pretty much expected not to find; they may stock miniature candy bars like Snickers, Mars, Milky Way, etc., but the so-called City of Love does not carry Hershey’s Kisses.

By this point my bitch-o-meter was at about a 6 out of 10, so it was time to move along. Cookie cutters—dammit. I had to backtrack to the “house and kitchen” section of the Vortex. And what did I find there? NO GINGERBREAD MEN is what. Not one. I found tree shapes (yay!) and lots of festive cake molds, but no good old-fashioned gingerbread man cookie cutters. WHY THE HELL NOT? French Christmas decorations often feature gingerbread men! So where do they keep the corresponding cookie cutters? My bitch-o-meter inched up to a 7. I needed a drink. Spiked eggnog would have been nice, except eggnog is ANOTHER CHRISTMAS THING YOU CAN’T GET IN FRANCE.

In the end, I had to go to an arts and crafts store on the other side of town the next day for my gingerbread man. Obviously, the cutters weren’t sold separately; I had to buy a pack of three in various sizes. Oh well. I ALSO found green and red colored sugar! Granted, the red was definitely fuchsia, but it was labelled rouge, so I took it. Total cost for sugar and cookie cutters: 19 euros. Yeah.

When cookie baking day rolled around, I pulled out my recipes, organized my ingredients, summoned my children, and got to work.

It took six hours. SIX HOURS.

First of all, we only have one cookie tray (technically two if you count the pizza tray, but it’s “not optimal” and I mean that in the Benghazi sense). Second, our oven can only handle two racks. Also, whatever one is supposed to use as a surface for rolling out and cutting up cookie dough, we clearly don’t have that. Doing it directly on the countertop seemed weird, so I used a cutting board. The cutting board is not big. Anyway, our limited production capacity meant that our productivity level was destined to be mediocre from the get-go. That did not stop us. We rolled out portions of dough, the kids obviously fought over who got to do the cutting, I managed to get the cookies off the cutting board and onto the various trays without completely destroying their shapes, and into the oven they went.

Decorating the cookies was another romp through the fields of wholesome-family-moments-gone-terribly-awry. Have you ever made icing? I hadn’t. The recipe called for powdered sugar and water. Do you know what happens when you mix powdered sugar and water using an electrical hand mixer? Clouds of powdered sugar rising into your face is what happens. My kids thought this was hilarious. Spooning said icing onto the cookies was rather messier than I’d imagined as well, but we got through it. The kids THOROUGHLY enjoyed decorating the iced cookies, and for a few moments there I really did catch a glimpse of the “holiday moment” I’d been aiming for all along.

Alas, it was short-lived. The decorating committee soon began to squabble over supplies, which rapidly degenerated into mutual accusations of ineptitude, followed by insults and verbal attacks, physical aggression, and ultimately eviction of the committee from the premises. The committee was reconvened after a 10-minute break and told in no uncertain terms that such behavior was not reflective of the Christmas spirit and would not be tolerated.

Did that help? Not really, but we (I) gritted our (my) teeth and got through it. In the end, the house smelled Christmassy and the cookies were actually pretty tasty. The kitchen, however, took about an hour to put back into order, and seeing as how I’d had quite enough “help” from my children for one day, I thought it wiser to limit the clean-up committee to those above the age of 10. This obviously gave me ample time to mutter under my breath about holding Hallmark and its holiday propaganda (in particular that ca. 1990s Oh Holy Night commercial) FULLY RESPONSIBLE for guilt-tripping me into believing that family Christmas baking is a thing, when in truth I’m pretty sure that all those beautiful sugary cookies our neighbors used to give us when I was a kid were MADE BY ADULTS, WHILE LISTENING TO NAT KING COLE AND SIPPING BRANDY.

Oh well, there’s always next year. 

Climate change

I spent the better part of my young adult years living in drafty apartments. The drafts didn’t matter much when I was in college, mainly because my college was in Texas and the winters didn’t last that long to begin with. Then I moved to Paris, where draftiness is a way of life, so I sucked it up and shivered along with everybody else. Winter after winter I would turn on my crappy electric wall heaters, complain about their inefficiency, then get that first electric bill of the season and decide that I’d rather just freeze. At some point I went and bought a portable space heater, which I would aim at my feet while hunkering over a bowl of coffee in the morning and then cuddle up with on the couch in the evening. Then I met G., who is a sort of human radiator, which helped (somewhat). But hey, winter in Paris only lasts what, six months? Eight at the most?

But who’s counting?

Then we moved to the suburbs and discovered collective heating. Gone are the hefty electric bills, as it’s simply factored into our rent, and the day it was turned on my memories of being even remotely cold indoors instantly vanished. Why? Because our floorboards kick out so much heat that we could pretty much dress in swimwear all winter long and be just fine. Our jar of Nutella has melted for Pete’s sake. I don’t know who exactly decides what temperature our apartment is heated to, but I suspect our neighbors across the landing. They’ve had it in for us ever since that first week when my husband pounded one little nail into a piece of Ikea furniture at midnight. Look, we’re sorry we woke up your daughter, OK? No need to try to slowly roast us into moving. Besides, it won’t work; I LIKE the heat. I think it’s exotic living in a subtropical microclimate while freezing rain pelts the windows. Seriously, we could grow palm trees in here.

Heatwave! This is our island in the sun...

Which is why I was surprised when our pet cactus up and died on us. One would think the constant dry heat would be ideal for desert plants. Alas, no. We felt bad disposing of it, as it was our first living purchase since moving into our new home and all. But much like a Christmas tree in February, its time had come. And much like a Christmas tree in February, getting rid of it was no easy task. You can’t just throw out a giant cactus, at least not around this town. We have a neighbor who actually refers to herself, with pride, as La Responsable Poubelles (“Trashcan Manager”). She rang our doorbell at 9:00 am two days after our arrival, just to point out that we newcomers obviously didn’t know how to handle our trash properly (our empty cardboard boxes were soi-disant taking up too much room in the recycling bin). Our own real-life Oscar the Grouch. Neat.

What did you expect, a fruit basket?

Anyway, so not wanting to elicit the wrath of Madame Trashcan, we didn’t dare just chuck the cactus into the communal bin. Luckily, we didn’t have to: in a flash of insight, I recalled an incident from days long ago, when I had had to resort to hacking the limbs off a long-dead Christmas tree using a pair of desk scissors in order to fit it down the trash chute. I thus decided that pocket-sawing the cactus into smaller pieces and then bagging them Dexter-style could be a possibility. It was a gruesome task, what with the dull saw, frothy cactus juice spatters and my conscience, but it’s been a week and no knock on the door, so I dare say we got away with it. Besides, does she really want to go head to head with a scantily-clad American chick who has no fingerprints (read: who could be a professional assassin if she were more discreet)? I didn’t think so.

Bonne année 2013!

After a long absence (I have no excuse), I am back at the keyboard, ready to turn my discerning gaze upon unsuspecting new subject matter. And subject matter there will be this year, for I am simultaneously embarking on two new Franco-American adventures: becoming my own Boss(!) and becoming a first-time Parent(!!!). So yes, 2013 will be no small year for me, and thus, no small year for Le Mot Juste!

In mental preparation for such formidable life changes, my first managerial decision was to give my star employee (myself) a nice long break to relax and gather her resources Stateside. Besides, one cannot seriously critique life as a pseudo expat without going home from time to time to re-immerse oneself in one’s own culture. So here I am, re-immersed. 

Fellow patriots.

There is a certain “honeymoon” period every time I return to the US, during which I marvel, newly-arrived-immigrant style, at what now seems so exotic about American life after 10+ years abroad. Eight-lane freeways, for example, or unlimited refills, or just about anything from Costco. Sometimes I just wander through Target, amazed at the availability of so much stuff, at such low prices. Good mascara for 5 bucks—oh! In France, I shell out so much more than that for the same damn thing.

Yesterday we stepped out (i.e. got in the car and drove for an hour “to the city”) to see the new Matt Damon flick, Promised Land. To my surprise, the theater offered IMAX, 3D and vibrating seats! When did this start? Anyway, the movie I liked. I also liked the big empty theater, which was a nice change from France, where I have long become maniacal about showing up early for fear of being left with a front-row seat, or worse, no seat at all.

Hurry up and wait.

Regardless of a few flops, I remain a big fan of Matt Damon, whom I prefer any day to both Leonardo, who for some reason bugs me, and especially to Brad, whom I flat-out cannot stand. Why the entire world seems to judge him a great actor is beyond me. I’m tempted to go to Google and type “Brad Pitt is a mediocre actor,” just to see if it will guess what I’m typing before I’m done typing it (thereby proving this has been typed many times before and I am not alone in my distaste), but I’m sure the second I type “Brad Pitt is...” Google will instead suggest one of its perennial favorites: “gay” or “dead.” A lot of people must be searching for these things if Google is spontaneously guessing them. It’s an interesting insight into our national hang-ups I suppose. Compare with Google France, which judging by its most frequent suggestions seems to suspect that everyone is Jewish (or gay or dead). So whereas American Internet surfers appear to be obsessed with sexual orientation, French ones appear to (still) be obsessed with who exactly has Hebrew ancestry. I shudder to imagine the consequences had Google existed during the Occupation.

The movie was quite good. Early reviews don’t seem to agree with me, but I like seeing an American film that dares to question the practice of fracking, however half-heartedly. The subject has been a big fat deal in France for some time, much as have GMOs, while both seem to be relatively new buzzwords on this side of the world. I was delighted to see a California measure on the ballot this November proposing the compulsory labeling of all GMO-containing foods, yet my “health conscious” home state voted it down! I see this as perfectly bizarre given the success of all those “they’re out to get us” diet books topping best seller lists and striking fear into the hearts of those who would dare consume sugar/carbs/meat/milk/soy/corn and now, wheat. That’s right, wheat is now what’s making America fat

The new face of evil.

I wonder whether the paranoia we seem to have in this country about what our food may be doing to us is at all related to the paranoia of those who harbor an obsessive fear of our government. I remember a day in my 12th grade AP Civics class, during which the teacher took out a long strip of paper and wrote the entire political spectrum on it, beginning with the extreme left (anarchy) and ending with the extreme right (fascism). When she was done, she joined the two ends together, forming one continuous circle. The point of course was that in the end, both forms of extremism stand shoulder to shoulder. I won’t go so far as suggesting that right-wing militia who arm themselves to the teeth with automatic weapons on the off chance that federal agents one day show up on their lawns in an attempt to seize their “freedom” are in the end not so different from left-wing activists who are convinced that the Department of Agriculture is purposefully trying to poison us all with genetically modified organisms, but it does give one pause for thought. “I love my country but fear my government” seems to have universal appeal in states both blue and red.

And there you have it.

This notion of fearing one’s democratically-elected government is among the most difficult to explain to the French, for whom the government has long lost its fear factor and could more aptly be likened to a doting mother nursing her hungry child. Fear the government? Whatever for? The government means health care, education, justice, jobs, transportation, vacation, retirement, and much more. As Adam Gopnik has observed in his own book of reflections on life in France, Paris to the Moon, “The American populist belief is that there is a secret multinational agency ready to swoop down from the skies and make everybody work for the government; the French populist belief is that there is a secret government agency that may yet swoop down from the skies and give everybody a larger pension.”

This government love fest of course comes at the price of exorbitant taxes on everything from how much you eat to how many televisions you own, yet doesn’t seem to bother anyone all that much. Consider current French President François Hollande’s attempt to hike income taxes on France’s wealthiest to a whopping 75% (that’ll teach THEM to be rich!), which very nearly became reality. Such a proposal in the US would not only be met with categorical refusal, while surely spelling the political demise of whoever was foolish enough to suggest it, but would doubtless be considered by many as irrefutable proof that government is evil.  

Just another reason why sharing my life between both shores provides so much to ponder. But that’s all the pondering I can muster for today. Thanks for hanging in there, and stay tuned for future rants and reflections at Le Mot Juste.

Are we there yet?

Paris is not beloved for its weather, so I shall resist the urge to devote an entire blog post to complaining about the fantastically depressing low-pressure system that has been ours to bear since mid-March, leaving me resentfully muttering “always winter but never Christmas,” and instead focus on one of my favorite topics: modern transportation and why it’s out to get me.

After a particularly difficult week at work at the end of last month, I decided to travel to my husband's parents’ home in the south of France for a much-needed weekend of R&R. The south is warm; the south is sunny; the south is full of cicadas going tse-tse-tse-tse-tse. I love the south! What’s not to love? I’ll tell you what: the 10-hour train ride it takes to get there.

“A 10-hour ride?!” you might gasp. “Surely not! France has wonderful high-speed transportation!” To which I might reply, “HA HA HA HA!!!”

Now, I may have had my differences with certain commercial airlines—whose names shall not be mentioned—but in general I enjoy taking the train. Sure it tends to run late, but it’s so much more convenient than the plane that I really don’t care about punctuality (hell, I don’t care about it elsewhere in my life; why care about it here?). However, there is normal, make-an-entrance late and then there is OMG-you’ve-got-to-be-kidding, theater of the absurd late. The difference? Four letters: S-N-C-F.

It all began normally enough: I left work “early” (6:45 pm), went to the Gare de Lyon train station and boarded my train. Foreshadowing the unpleasantness to come, my 1st class ticket had no seat assignment. This is a fairly new gimmick from the SNCF, France’s national railway company. The basic concept is this: you pay for a seat, but then don’t actually get one. Isn’t that innovative? But hey, you’re still allowed to board. If you’re lucky, you can snag a rare vacant seat at some point during your voyage. If you’re unlucky, you can stand (or sit on your suitcase in the dining car). Either way, the SNCF gets your dough. I’d say it’s a win-win deal (for them). So that’s how my voyage began: with no seat. Luckily, at about an hour into the trip, a kindly conductor told me that there were open seats at the front of the train. Score one for me!

Except here’s the thing: no sooner had I occupied my newly-found seat than the train ground to a halt. “Your attention please. Our train has stopped in the middle of the tracks. For your safety, please do not attempt to open the doors,” announced the all-too-familiar automatic voice of the SNCF. Uh-oh.
Ten minutes later: “Your attention please. Our train has stopped in the middle of the tracks....” This isn’t happening.
Thirty minutes later: “Your attention please.” Putaaaaaaaaain.

THREE AND A HALF HOURS LATER, a real voice informed us that the train was, in reality, dead. No sh*t. By that time, we’d lost electricity and were thus “stopped in the middle of the tracks” AND in the dark. Plus I was starving, so I figured it was as good a time as any to enjoy my little paper bag dinner. For those of you who have never tried eating a sandwich on a train in the dark, it’s an interesting experience. Since the air conditioning had obviously gone out as well, and of course the windows were all sealed shut, my fellow passengers were able to truly appreciate the aroma of my sandwich. Luckily for them, it was cucumber and not chicken curry. And luckily for me, they couldn’t have found me anyway.

See?

Sadly, this was but the prelude. At some point, we were given the reason for the train’s death: “la moteur a brûlé.” Oh good! So we’re locked in a train with the engine on fire, I thought. Why is no one reacting to this? And indeed, the stereotypical complaining Parisian was nowhere to be had; these people seemed rather stoic. Instead of rioting, they just sighed and made that distinctive “pfffffff” sound that expresses Gallic exasperation. Incomprehensible. I, on the other hand, was seeing black. Er, red.

At long last, we were informed that a new TGV had arrived behind ours and that firefighters(!) would be escorting all 650 of us along the tracks and onto the new train. At half past midnight, evacuation began (very slowly): one by one, we descended a dubious aluminum ladder out onto the sloping side of the tracks, which was basically one giant pile of over-sized gravel officially called “track ballast” (at least my vocabulary benefited from the experience). Dragging our suitcases/children/domestic animals through said ballast, we stumbled along as best we could, in the dark, for 400+ meters. A grand total of three firefighters were equipped with headlamps, which they kindly directed our way, but just between us it felt preeeeetty improvised. Like, I don’t think the SNCF staff exactly goes through preparative drills for this kind of situation (considering their lousy track record, they might want to reconsider that). The firefighters either for that matter. Sigh.

Similar to our evacuation route. Minus the “in the dark” factor.

All those people took a long damn time being evacuated (also disconcerting), which left us stuck for a good hour and a half before the new train finally sputtered to life ... and took us backward to the Mâcon train station, where we were given water bottles. That was nice of them. But by that point, I couldn’t have cared less about water; I just wanted to arrive already. With our backtrack taken into account, 200 km still lay between me and my destination. Plus, no sooner had the water been distributed and the doors closed for departure than a pregnant woman began to feel faint (no joke—that’s what midnight strolls with the SNCF will do to a person). So the firemen had to come BACK on board to tend to her, which added another hour. TGV: the only high-speed train that travels at zero kph.

False advertising.

Finally, finally, FINALLY we left. And went ... to Lyon (still not my destination). By then it was 3:30 am and the lunch boxes that were distributed to calm/nourish us held no interest for me whatsoever. I didn’t want a tin of tuna rillettes; I wanted to strangle every member of the SNCF executive board with my bare hands. “Railroad maintenance” kept us parked at the Lyon station for another 30 minutes (because as everyone knows, 3:30 am is the ideal moment to work on the tracks. Especially when it’s clearly the TRAINS that need maintaining). At long last, we began to roll; this time in the right direction. And at 5:30 am, I found my sleepy husband waiting for me at the station. By the time I fell into bed, cursing modern transportation and certain I would have been better off taking a steam locomotive (or a bicycle), the birds were chirping cheerfully away in the trees. Of course they were; I’d be cheerful too if I had wings. Merci la SNCF.

Drug abuse

Ah, early summer in Paris. The trees are green, the flowers are blooming, the sun is (occasionally) shining and it is time at last to give those winter clothes that I cannot bear to look at another minute to the Children of Madagascar. Away with the heater, away with the sub-arctic-strength comforter—warm weather is just around the corner!

However, there is that one last hurdle standing between me and the long-awaited summer months: allergy season. From the first to the last day of June, I am an absolute mess of allergy rage. I don’t know which pollen is the culprit, but every year it happens like clockwork. And every year entire forests disappear because of my pathological Kleenex consumption.

Now, considering that Paris has a number of corner pharmacies sufficient to reassure even the most resolute hypochondriacs, one would THINK that I could get my hands on an over-the-counter anti-histamine with relative ease. Mais non! The French may pop medication like skittles, but if you ask me, it is flat-out wimpy medication. As a friend of mine once said, giving French anti-allergy pills to someone like me is like giving sugar to a coke head.

But this year is going to be different. This year I had the foresight to stock up on good ol’ American allergy relief pills while home for Christmas. Yay! And so, on the eve of another Paris June, I look unflinchingly upon all that new greenery sending billowing clouds of pollen my way and say, bring it on.

Baby, it's cold outside

Growing up in America, I learned that Christmas cards are supposed to be sent before Christmas. OK, that’s not exactly true. My mother has always insisted that the “Twelve Days of Christmas” grant one a 12-day extension—from December 25 to January 6—but even she must admit that Epiphany is the absolute limit of what good Christmas card-sending etiquette will allow. This is yet another reason why my parents should move to France, where the custom is to send Christmas cards all through the month of January. Hence, on this final day of the month, the Christmas season in France officially draws to a close. And I must admit, it has left me a bit melancholy.

Christmas is something that I look forward to for roughly half the year. Being of firm Cancerian nature, I can’t help myself. I may have hit 30, but Christmas to me still means magic: it means the Nutcracker; it means Handel; it means the heavenly smell of Douglas firs and a festive array of Norwegian specialties like lefse and julekake, lovingly baked by my mother every year. In short, Christmas means Home, wrapped and adorned in all the best of what the subconscious associates with it. When I fall asleep in December, I dream of sipping mulled wine at Fezziwig’s Christmas party.

But when the holiday season draws to an end and life returns to normal, I find myself suffering from a sort of emotional hangover. I leave the festivities and my family behind once more and return to Paris, which may be my adopted home but somehow never seems less welcoming than when I land at Charles de Gaulle airport after the Christmas holidays, my suitcase heavy with gifts and my heart heavy with farewells, to gray Paris skies and bitter January cold. In a city where winter temperatures arrive in November and can sometimes stick around right through March, January is a month that Parisians just grit their teeth and get through. There are of course some “winter people” out there, those thermally-misguided few who embrace the cold and find some sort of bizarre fulfillment in wrapping themselves in coats, scarves, hats, gloves, boots, etc. Not me. Once Christmastime is over and presents put away, I don’t care to see a single snowflake floating down from above, no matter how pretty they are or how ardently I may have celebrated their appearance only a month prior.

If I had it my way, the year would progress as follows: April, May, June, July, August, September, October, December. The only downside that I can see to this abbreviated approach is that I would now be 15 years older than I actually am, which would automatically skip me right over the whole child-bearing period and would thus deprive the world of my future scions—truly a shame. On the other hand, I would also be that much closer to retirement, which almost makes giving up said future scions worthwhile.

But alas, winter for the moment is showing no signs of letting up. Snowflakes continue to fall, night continues to reign, and if I am to believe what I’ve just heard on the news, it ain’t over yet. But we shall not give up all hope: spring is surely out there somewhere, just waiting for the right moment to show her lovely face (right? Right?). So until then, G. and I will continue to “hunker down,” warming ourselves with comfort food and 14% ABV reds, until that blessed day when Old Man Winter finally decides to shuffle off.

Say cheese!

This entry is the second installment in a 3-part series on the crown jewels of French cuisine. Last week, we covered the wide world of Parisian bread; next week, we seriously get into the vino. But today it’s all about the cheese.

As Meg Ryan’s character says to Kevin Kline’s character in French Kiss (one of my all-time favorite movies, even if it is a bit … cheesy. Har har), “Did you know that there are 452 official government cheeses in this country? Don't you think that's incredible? To come up with 452 ways of classifying what is basically a bacterial process?”

It is incredible, all this French cheese. Not to bash my motherland or anything, but let’s face it: American cheese is a joke. I mean, I like sharp cheddar as much as the next guy, but let’s be honest: our cheese comes in two colors—orange and off-white—and we turn it into such oddities as string cheese, cottage cheese, hamburger cheese, low-fat and non-fat cheese, soy cheese, spray cheese, Velveeta and my personal favorite, Cheez Whiz (at which point it is no longer appropriate to refer to the product as “cheese” per se, but rather “cheez,” just to truly express the extent of the denaturalization to which it has been subjected). Sad, I tell you; sad, sad, sad.

Some will point out that America also makes delicious farm cheeses and that I’m being too harsh because Wisconsin and Vermont and even my own California all make great American cheese. Just look:

I have never understood this ad campaign. California makes incredible wine, grows delicious avocados and citrus and also produces some really tasty almonds. But I’m sorry; never have I been wowed by the cheese selection at any of the many, many, many Californian grocery stores that I have frequented.

France, on the other hand, will never be beat when it comes to cheese. Mmmmm. Walk into any French grocery store, no matter how small, and you’ll be offered a range of cheeses that commands respect. And those are just the grocery stores! Fromageries are a whole other category! I can actually smell the cheese just thinking about it. Oh wait, that’s because my boyfriend just opened the refrigerator. (Side note: I think I’ll start referring to him in this blog as “G.” so as to semi-preserve his anonymity while avoiding overuse of the sophomoric term “my boyfriend.”)

Yes, it’s true: French cheese is stinky. Delicious, mind you, but stinky. G. and I keep our cheese selection in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator, next to an open box of baking soda (sold only in pharmacies here, incidentally; perhaps to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands?). But do you think that has any real effect on the odor? Not really, no. However, the alternative—cheese elimination—is unthinkable, and so we ignore the odor. Or rather, I ignore the odor. Being French, G. probably thinks that that’s just how cheese smells. And if we’re being technical, he’s right; that is how cheese smells … when you haven’t pasteurized the hell out of it (eh-hem FDA). What is so scary about raw-milk cheese? The French have been eating it for centuries, and the last I heard, raw-milk cheese consumption has yet to have any impact on French mortality rates. So what’s the deal? On the flip side, you can of course get pasteurized cheese in France, too (Pasteur was French after all), but it only serves as a bland—albeit less stinky—alternative to real cheese.

As we celebrated Thanksgiving this past week, I think the following cheese and Thanksgiving-related story is appropriate: in 1999, I was living with a French family just outside of Paris while participating in my university’s foreign exchange program. At the end of November, my brother flew out from California to spend a few weeks with me and celebrate Thanksgiving à la française. Over the course of his stay, he had many opportunities to sample a wide array of French cheeses, all of which he just LOVED but, sadly, none of which he could find in the US upon his return. 

So two years ago for Christmas I thought I would surprise him with a real raw milk camembert. I lovingly selected it at the airport boutiques at Charles de Gaulle airport, had it double wrapped in tinfoil and put into a little container that I had brought along with me to mask its odor. The flight went just fine; I even put the bag in the overhead compartment so as to avoid any telltale scents from escaping. However, as is often the case, my connecting flight was canceled due to poor weather (which the airline naturally classified as an “act of God,” as if God Himself had wanted to teach me a lesson about smuggling unpasteurized dairy products into America). The result was that I had to spend the night in a hotel near the airport and take the first available flight the next morning. Did the hotel room have a refrigerator in it? No. 

By the time my cheese and I finally touched down the following day, I was more than ready to hop into my brother’s truck and begin the 90-minute commute to our parents’ home in the mountains. However, after greetings and hugs, my brother’s first comment was something along the lines of, “WHAT is that smell?!” Terribly proud of myself, I answered, “I brought you a surprise!” His response: “You’re not putting that thing in my truck. I just cleaned it.” So we put the cheese in the truck bed with my suitcase and headed off. In the end, my family was touched that I had gone to such lengths to bring them this cheesy treat from across the Atlantic, but no one wanted to eat it. “It smells like sweaty feet!” was my mom’s first reaction. “Pheeeeew! Something's ripe in here!” was my dad’s (of course, by that time the cheese had been traveling for something like 42 hours. How would you smell?). Being the good sports that they are, though, they at least tried it. The verdict? The taste was great, but the odor was just too overpowering for their uninitiated noses. So in the end, we brought the cheese to the annual Christmas party thrown by some very dear friends of ours who know and celebrate France and its 452 glorious cheeses. They loved it.